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Mike, wondering

Management Parables: Love ’em or Hate ’em

The original draft of First, Know What You Want was a management fable in the style of The One Minute Manager or Who Moved My Cheese. It flowed pretty quickly out of the end of my fingers and I enjoyed writing it even though I don’t normally like that kind of style. My publisher did not like it either.

You might though. So here it is, online and free, the story version of First, Know What You Want.

Enjoy.

A Seven Ways Parable

The story for the rest of us…

Some people are born knowing what they want. As they grow they quickly embrace the idea of setting strong or challenging goals and something ignites them to pursue those goals. Some grow to become sports stars, some politicians, some become over excited motivational speakers and others end up as high achieving business people. Almost all of them, if they gain financial success, publish a book laying out their philosophy of understanding what you want and pursuing it with determination. It all seems so easy.

Then there are the rest of us.

Our goals, if we think of them as such, are modest. A life partner, a family, making a small contribution, security. When challenged to say what we really want, our most honest answer is that we don’t know and if we do know then it’s because we stumbled across it while doing something else. We can only stand aside slightly shamefaced as the motivated and driven yell about the process of goal setting. We tried it once and it didn’t really work.